EventGram

EventGram — Turning Instagram Posts into Your Social Calendar

Inspiration

Every time we wanted to find events happening around campus, we had to open Instagram and scroll endlessly through different club pages. There was no single place to see all upcoming events — posts got buried, and we’d often miss things we actually wanted to go to.

That frustration inspired us to build EventGram Bot, an AI-powered assistant that finds and organizes events posted by clubs on Instagram, so you never miss what’s happening.

What it does

EventGram automatically:

1. Fetches posts from authorized club Instagram pages.
2. Extracts event details (name, date, venue, time) using NLP.
3. Organizes them into a unified calendar or event feed.
4. Lets users chat with a RAG-based chatbot to ask things like: “What’s happening this weekend?” or “Show me tech club events.”

The goal is to transform scattered Instagram event posts into a smart, searchable event discovery experience.

How we built it

1. Data Collection – Collected Instagram post data (post images, captions, hashtags, and metadata) from authorized club accounts. Pulled in events from the NEU events webpage to complement Instagram-sourced data.
2. Information Extraction – Used NLP pipelines to identify event-related keywords and structured fields (event name, date, venue).
3. RAG Pipeline – Stored event data as embeddings in a vector database (pinecone). Implemented Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to retrieve relevant events and generate natural responses to user queries.
4. Frontend & Chatbot – Built a simple chat + google calendar integration feature to make event discovery intuitive.

Challenges we ran into

1. Instagram API Restrictions: Instagram doesn’t allow scraping other profiles unless they explicitly authorize access. This limited how many club pages we could gather data from.
2. Unstructured Data: Event information was hidden in post images, captions, emojis, and hashtags — making it hard to extract cleanly. We had to experiment with OCR, NLP parsing and regex-based extraction.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1. Built a working RAG-based chatbot that can actually find events from real Instagram posts.
2. Created a structured events data from unstructured social media data and successfully combined data from multiple sources (Instagram + NEU Events webpage).
3. Integrating with Google calendar to schedule it in our personal calendar space, so we can easily keep track.

What we learned

1. The ins and outs of Retrieval-Augmented Generation and vector search.
2. How to clean and parse unstructured social media text.
3. The importance of data permissions and respecting platform restrictions.
4. Building a smooth chat experience to make AI interaction more natural.

What's next for EventGram

1. Expand access: Partner with more clubs and organizations for authorized data sharing.
2. Ensuring events stay up-to-date required periodic data refreshes and re-embedding pipelines.
3. Add event recommendations: Use embeddings to suggest events based on user interests.
4. Create a mobile app for real-time event notifications.

EventGram’s mission is simple - Never miss a Northeastern event again. Let AI find what’s happening for you.

Built With

• anthropic
• pinecone
• pydantic
• python
• rag
• rest
• selenium
• streamlit
• vectordb
• webscraping